Perhaps I should not own a phone. It’s Short Message Service, in my employ, allows a nearly ubiquitous, immediate reach of the text, from my thumbs.

Thank you for telling me about the exhibition, I have the retrospective tome near me even now, attempting to go in and near the two-dimensional images on paper. It is not the same as being present to the sculptures and paintings, their ambience. But now I know I could not move around them, nor touch them, I’d have only to use my eyes and very little of my body.

This obsession with connection. Once I would have had to go to work unlinked to any of you for hours at a time. Once my going home would mean your absence unless we arranged for sharing space and time. Now I reach, I report, I ask and beg, and enter your lives like someone shoving a newspaper, pamphlet or flyer into your hands at will – without contact – propaganda blaring from speakerless speakers.

Your mails and email show deference and thought. I am happy to have your works near at hand to consult and resort to time and again. I see the care in the hand-writing, the pacing of thoughts, the reasoning reflection, the sense of your audience. They lie about me on the floor, I can feel them, turn them, taste them if I wish.

Your phone makes a hum or a buzz. An ejaculatory missive from Filbert again. He’s lonely, he’s excited, he’s drunk. He wants to share. He needs to share. He needs communique. He wants connection. He is not thinking of us, he suffers the duress of himself. He spouts, he shouts, he slurs. He insists he needs solitude and rest, needs quiet, less public. At any hour, at all hours, these textual packets flow.

Perhaps I should not own a phone.

Where do the gaps that make the heart grow fonder bloom? What is banal and what evental?

Thank you for your poem. I will read it again and again. Thank you for that clip of music, I repeat it throughout the days, when the mood demands an answer. Thank you for your books, your artifacts, your gardens, your hands. Thank you for your eye-contact (those of you I’ve sat or walked, camped or climbed with). Thank you for the melodies of your particular voices. Thank you for your hugs, your nourishing, your care. Your listening.

I do remember the ground there, how it fell away desperately or rose violently into sky. What the birds did. Where the fire flowed. Yes, the leaves. Yes, the sleeping bags. Here’s to the unknown trails, the stumbling, to whatever’s discovered.

I am sorry I flood your phones with less than thoughtful driveling – explosions of fear, anxiety, want. Am I alone? Am I alone? Do I matter? Does anyone want my voice? Am I also missed? But also love. Yes, sometimes I merely wish to tell you the difference you make to being alive, that I feel you out there, somewhere…

How seeing depends… and deepens with what is searched for, what wants, who opens, what feels, within each where-when, becoming there-thens, seeing how.

It begins, then, all seeing, between. Bounding back-forth in light and light and any weighted things, ever shifting seeing-sea and emptied sky, re-membering differences to seamlessness, with opaque clarity, as such your “I.”

Like this:

I close one eye as a hint or signal. Almost-gesture of complicity, alliance. Miniscule nod of knowingness. Nearly clandestine. We are accomplice.

Subtlety. In the colors of sunsets are moments. Light in trees, precipitation, breeze and wind. Occasions, occurrences. A brush, a jolt, a catch, or slip. Just there, just then, just whom.

Sum of an enormous fund of letters, sounds, marks, and inferences composing a confused and compossible khora of language actuated haphazardly in discourse, and conversation, a dated letter, an exclamation or response… one might say the signsea winks or glimmers. A squinch or sparkle of potential affinities and conflicts, affiliations and consorts. Then gone. A breath. A…

Glance. A glimpse shuttered quickly, asymmetrically. What does it mean? Something. Something of nothing. Like accident, collision, like misreckoning, mistake. Like harmony, accord, or intercourse.

“in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as a trumpet sound… the dead shall be raised, and we shall be changed”…(I Cor 15:52, changed).

Picture, if you can, if you will, a spill of sonority, funneled through lung, through throat, whirling the mouth cavity, battened by teeth, and leaving the lips as a word… now whispering air as smoky exhalation… mingling and woven in the voice of another… such breaths, these terms, these inscriptions… how they collide and collude, coalesce and caress, commingle and pass on…

Moments, instants, mishaps or miracles…and all shall be changed…or so it is written, supposed, and declared…

Martin responds, wondering. Curious as to that which it applies, or whom, or what. Contemplating reference. Filled with questions. Martin says, “yes,” almost under his breath.

Elf shrugs. Elf walks on.

Martin follows, thinking, looking at leaves falling into blades of grass, alerted by the shushing and darting of squirrels, saddened at the amplified pffft of cars passing by. Wishing for silence. Wondering if Elf will speak a further word or two. Sensing like a dowsing rod for meanings.

Walks on. Shuffles. Walks on.

Martin, too.

There’s a relative silence from the two of them – these humans wandering across a concreted trail. Sure there’s the sound of their footfalls, scuffles, even some noise in the pause of it. Or the noise of the absence of noise. But you’d have to be different to hear the breathing, the heart pulse, the slide of muscles and blood. As far as humans-in-environs go, the pair presents retraction.

Hard to say for soil. The squares composing sidewalk must suffer pressure, absorbed by the earth beneath and shared out through verberations for miles. Hard to say for air. Full-grown males, plodding forth like prows along a rickety line-of-motion has to be pushing particles around, making waves. Nothing gives report.

Like this:

Marc hasn’t approached such things in a very long time, having left ranches for cities decades ago. He’s never perceived his father this way – a sodden, curled lump, a heavy heap of human – laying not far from a dissolving and evaporating campsite. Still.

Alias ponders “still as stasis or persistence or both/and?” in his notebook in his study. “Most often I use ‘still’ with some indication of both – stubborn, persistent, continual, unmoving – obstacles.”

“Sons stumped by their fathers. Fathers blocking their sons.” Alias wrote as Lucy re-entered their provisional home (what “home” is not?).

Laramie lay still, sopping, weighing more than any many should, it seemed to Marc. Now fathering the labor of his unfortunate offspring, hovering over it/him like a bent tree, not quite as strong, but still stuck and rooted.

“The child is father to the man…still,” Alias jotted, telling Lucy that he’s stuck in the awful muddling middle of things, still wanting several things to be possible at once, believing they ought appropriately have right to be – including (but not limited to) both of their happinesses and satisfaction… fulfillments… but unable to see quite how, and for some strange reason thinking acutely of Laramie, wondering about him today – where he is and how – and all of their good, promising, talented grown children, and why they all increasingly feel alone, distant, farther from one another with age, in spite or in direct conflict with his feeling of the relative, mandatory, even necessary import and significance of these very few – very few consistent, momentous, continual and crucial relations – one another, their some sort of shared offspring or circumstanced charges, numbered friends, one another… handful of humans they ‘trust’ ‘still’ – and the vagaried ambiguity of all of these terms.

Marc prods the body with his boot. His father weighs too much. Too heavy. Too absent. Too still. Sensei had startled his mother Maribel, returning to the ranch stables alone. Who startled his sister Anna, startling Marc via telephone, still. And now here, miles from anywhere, hating, prodding, regretting, wishing this sodden, sullen lump of heavy matter wasn’t his lifeless father, Laramie, his mother’s errant husband, his sister’s rugged hero, the persistent stasis of his dad.

Tension reigns, still. Vitality. Forces working upon and with forces. Matter and space and energy and time, perhaps. At the very least a conflicted Alias in tangled tango with his beloved antagonist Lucy, unaware, intuitive, confused and undone, while Marc is shoving his inert father, Maribel quivers, Anna waits, and Lucy huffs down the hall. Life keeps pressing on and stopping, still.

Like this:

“it was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever. Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost.”

–Samuel Beckett-

The silence. The separation. The solitude. This is not novel, not uncanny, not even irregular or unexpected.

Betwixt Alias & Laramie, in fact, it would not be unusual for 1-3 years to pass without interpersonal communication.

The interruption, irregularity, or stretching intermittence of intimate interaction (current parlance “intensive interaction” – what they’re calling genuine conversation these days – a sort of treatment or therapeutic method for the autistic or ‘disabled,’ – akin to the ‘Talking Cure’ of psychoanalytics past) wasn’t really odd or unexpected or otherwise for Alias…merely unfortunate…he accustomed to his cycles and wishes, routines and desires – never mated very well with the world-at-large…his surround.

Still somehow Laramie’s “off” was different.

Perhaps.

No matter.

Alias driven back to Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, and other authors of silences whom he’s long aspired to – wishing (not so secretly) that he might require only some genuine solipsism or solitude, a kind of retreat or reversal from the cultural logorrhea (social media posts, artist’s talks, professional blogs and listservs, tweets/tumbs/grams & feeds) –

incessant reports on one’s self

– disgusting yet enticing,

If other humans ever happened to ‘like’ or ‘follow,’ ‘share’ or ‘pin-it’ or – could it be – actually care?

Point is, Alias thinks as he murmurs and walks along, there is no meaning, purpose, or point to it all. “Think-writing” Laramie once called it (re: Alias’ poetry) – “simply inscriptions of progress, er, process…languaging what happens in your miniscule portion of the world (as you know it).”

said to Alias, “simply ‘OFF’” like a switch, a light, a life, a dream, a thought, an inception of memory, an hope, ON/OFF, ON/OFF, there/gone, here/gone, you/I, yes/no,…’OFF’ said Laramie, he said to Alias that day, that last day, that latest traversal, that…

…dream,

imagining, encounter, hope, wish, Alias imaginary…

———————————-

…because no one cares, and there is surely no reason to (Alias ruminates).

Having always wanted, desired, craved (it might even be said) to be some strange, unrepeatable and unique (or recognizable) combination of human/person/lover/writer/philosopher/musician/writer/virile male and sensitive, omniscient (no, not ‘omniscient,’ not ‘all-knowing’ but ‘all-considering,’ ‘all-comprehending’ and ‘-allowing,’ ‘understanding’) homo sapien.

There is never any reason (Alias considers) that he should (in any way) be special, “special,” and yet, and yet…

The large, long, horizony cosmic swath of atmosphere containing and surrounding human interaction (in this case, in any case) snaps. It fractures. The environment (in this case, with the pronunciation of ‘OFF’) simply breaks.

Like this:

Laramie liked to think himself a poet. One attuned, natural, native to his world(s). He liked to think he had unique feelings, perhaps an “insight,” an acute attention – that maybe he saw just a little bit more than others saw. And was able to say so.

A farmer-cowboy type from the upper Midwest, he played a lot of sports and performed muscled labor – at times enjoying the solitude of pasture rides and the company of large mammals. He felt a “care,” not sure for what, suspect he’d call it a kind of “connection” – with crop growth, animals, the waters and the skies. And felt he could say so. And he could sing. Musician, farmer, cowboy, son. Husband, scientist, laboring man. Father, friend, and “poet” (he might say). Laramie James Backstagger, dearly known to Alias.

“When you’re making it – forming words or music – do you feel somehow that you’re ‘getting it’?” Alias might ask, as they ambled the fields chopping at thistles, remedying fence. “Do words add to experience or just chop it up? Diminish? Reduce?” Alias chimed.

At times they’d play basketball, tennis (this was all in their youth, Alias having blown out his knees at the pigskin). And careful.

They both went on to cities: education, enlightenment, the ‘experience’ of cultural promises. They still had their debts to pay.

“I mean, when you ‘see’ it, or ‘hear’ it, are immersed – it’s not seeing or hearing or sensing – am I right? It’s just being – and then – ?” Alias prodded, “and then – what happens?” “You hear language, or find it or forge it, dream times or ‘intuit,’ you consider ways you’d be able to MARK it – note it down (letters or score) – recount or recreate it – even extend or rescind it – and that all seems like media to me: communication: expression or history or talk…but reduced. Reduced to what YOU can comprise or compose – not the ‘same’ as the moments, trembling in the web, and borrowing, borrowing, borrowing – from the wind and the trees, weather and bees, family and learning, working and friends – and our culture! – all funneled and cored to some desiccated fraction of bone – eviscerated – ‘HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’: some words or an etude or painting. Even action. Even sowing or reaping or pruning or care…’HERE LIES LARAMIE’S TAKE’ – wow! Really?! Amazing! One moment made this?! AND WHAT CARES? WHAT MATTERS? WHAT PURPOSE OR POINT, BENEFIT OR CONSEQUENCE…the next ‘now’?!”

Alias could go on and on like this. Often doing what he’d just described or decried.

And Laramie’d slow, maybe stop, often sit, and stare out. Have a smoke (he didn’t smoke, but pretended – his children and wife didn’t like it). And Alias would drink and get wiser. A little calmer and sad. And all might go quiet, save the world always humming.

Laramie Backstagger sighed.

“Well? Whadda ya think?” challenged Alias – “how is it for you when you speak, feel or sing?”

And how would he know, ailing Laramie? Been too many years of conflicting events and results and mixed feelings. Too many miles that worked out without working, or failed for the working too much. “I’m uncertain,” he said, “I’m uncertain.” “But you’re pushing at something in me.”

By now Alias was off on his own like a mammal, had concocted a scent for to trail. Maybe the ache was for sharing the thing they were sharing: agreement. Maybe to get through the whole business at once, simultaneously. Maybe to not be divided and different or just pieces of things – to be doubled or tripled or multiple? Harlequin – pieceworked and patched, back then and now and some future. An assemblage, a collage wanting melding.

“All uncertain,” Laramie said. “I can’t know, just I do it and feelings will follow. New ones. Pains from smashed understandings, joys from promising starts, aches at the poorness I lend them – but something goes on, carries forth – it don’t end with the birds and the breeze. The words have it too, and the voices. The shapes and the meanings and lines. Even tones. It goes on, both the good and the ill, and I’m part, or it seems such.”

“How ‘bout you?” Laramie wants to know. “Why do you carry on and keep blabbing,” he taunts.

“Just to borrow,” Harlequin murmurs. “Just to steal.” “To have something to say. To keep silent. To wish that it might carry on.” “It’s what we’ve got, all these things. Try as I might, I don’t know what else to do, and at times feel compelled, god dammit. Like Foucault or Blanchot or Spinoza. Or Buddha or Christ, Kafka or little Jane,” (little Jane was the crazy old lady – lived two miles from the Backstagger’s farm – she’d sparkle to company no matter the cause and just cackle and croon – mixing nonsense and stories, opinions and facts, just talking and talking and talking. No one knew if it ceased when they left, it never stopped within range of the hearing).